Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

Capn_Jack has most of the letters correct.
The 'b|' that looks like two characters is just one.
I'm told that it's pronounced something like the tail of the French "Oui", with a "rounded" tongue. After 14 years, my adopted Russian daughter still laughs at me when I attempt it!

According to "The International Columbian Naval Rendezvous and Review of April, 1893," by LT. George Peters USN (available from Google Books), the cruiser Rynda was the second foreign ship to arrive, on April 10, 1893. That the photo was taken on board her (although other Russian ships attended) is shown by the lettering on the men's hats, which even to someone only slightly familiar with the Cirillic letters evidently spells out something like that -- not sure where the "y" sound comes from but the P-like letter is definitely a Cyrillic "R" and the "H"-like letter would have the "N" sound.

There is lots to admire in the photo. The bow is to the right because of the angles of shrouds and backstays. The rigging is an odd mixture of modern and ancient practices, with iron or steel wire shrouds with eyes crimped in them using a process not much different from today's swaging, but tensioned by deadeyes and lanyards that would be instantly recognizeable to someone who had sailed with Drake or Anson. The mesh covering the lanyards is decorative and would have had to be removed to tension them. The crew must have spent countless hours polishing that padeye in the foreground. The coiled running rigging on the pinrail is made hyper-neat for inspection by the ropework loops holding it in place, but of course they would have to be removed to handle the sails.

There is a Wikipedia article (not much of one, but it does have a photo) of this class of ship (built 1883). It shows a barque rigged steamship with 2 funnels between fore and main masts. Two ships were built, and Rynda herself survived to be renamed Osvoboditel' after the Revolution, in 5/8/1917. The word "Rynda" means an unpaid, Imperial bodyguard of noblemen that was abolished by Peter the Great. The Imperial Navy had several ships by that name over the years, which is rather odd since the Russian Navy was pretty much created by the same tsar who had abolished the Rynda.

Just over a decade after this photo, the Imperial Russian Navy suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Russo-Japanese War. Fortunately the Rynda survived, most likely because it wasn't involved in the fighting, and lasted long enough to become part of the Soviet Navy following the 1917 Revolution.

Pic of a larger portion of the crew of this vessel appeared here previously. I am not fluent in Russian but I know enough to be able to transliterate the ship's name from the legend on the sailors' "flattops".

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.